Going to a coffee shop for wireless internet has just become a battle royale á la the Jets and the Sharks. Last week, Starbucks announced it would offer two hours of free Wi-Fi to its Canadian customers—a feature the Americans have had since a new incentive program Starbucks Rewards was offered in April 2008. Bell will also offer unlimited service to its high-speed and WiMAX customers—and in a cruel move, not Bell dial-up customers.......

FESTIVAL: Toronto's annual Taste of the Danforth festival returns tonight and runs until Sunday. Along with the usual smorgasbord of excellent Greek food come expected crowds of over 500,000, and a healthy serving of ambivalence. Danforth Avenue from Broadview Avenue to Jones Avenue, 6 p.m., FREE. INTERNET: Inspired by last year's mass YouTube community gathering in New York, the Ontario Science Centre is holding Canada's first large-scale YouTube meetup. Besides the usual attractions at......

Users of modern web browsers are getting used to not having to type in an entire URL to get to the page they want—most new browsers fill in the shorthand, so you can type in "Torontoist," for example, and don't have to worry about the .com suffix. Unless you're on Rogers, that is. Beginning yesterday (for us), Rogers users started getting a browser hijack for any failed DNS requests, which are usually due to......

If you have a few million bucks lying around, perhaps you'd consider buying 50% of Ashley MacIsaac's future music revenues? If you like the odds—note that MacIsaac declared bankruptcy in 2000; that his most successful album, released thirteen years ago, sold half a million copies; and that the auction contains the sorta ominous note that "the annuity will expire upon my death"—go for it. But thanks to the Reuters article, which notes that 1.5 million......

Amid all the cute overloading our recent Internet history, all the LOLcatz and YouTube Charlies, we began to feel that something very important was missing. We just couldn't figure out what it was. Did we need more plush? More anime? More stuff on our cats? No, no, no. We needed... Cute. Boys! Yes, there is now a blog devoted exclusively to the pursuit of happy, daydreamy, or hipsterishly sullen boy faces. Honest, we don't......

The government has introduced revamped copyright legislation intended to address the needs of the digital age, arousing the ire of people who like to copy stuff. However, the topic is complex and controversial, and MPs are ready to head to the cottage for the summer, so it's unlikely the changes will be passed anytime soon. A new survey has found that 75% of Canadians have used the Internet, with the percentage rising to 97%......

At the end of May, the Mesh Conference brought some of the internet's finest to Toronto. In the MaRS building, Canadians-done-good Michael Geist, Lane Merrifield, and Garrett Camp spoke about technology and the web. Laptops were open, ready to Google a fact or Twitter about a comment. We caught up with Garrett Camp just before he was about to have a night on the town. Camp, a Calgarian, was excited to meet up with some......

Wikipedia recently updated their list of the most prolific editors, and Torontoist was pleased to discover that at 181,749 edits, the most prolific human is a Toronto resident. Bearcat’s user profile describes him as "an underemployed gay freelance writer of Franco-Ontarian stock in Toronto, Ontario, who votes for the New Democratic Party, drinks Alexander Keith's, hangs out at the Church and Wellesley Timothy's." Yup, that sounds like a Wikipedia editor. Good for you Bearcat! You......

How many brands does it take to get you through the day? Jane, a pseudonymous Torontonian ad executive, sought to discover just that. She posted the results on her blog, Dear Jane Sample, in what Ad Broad later dubbed a “Brand Timeline Portrait.” It turns out that “portrait” is a surprisingly accurate description of what she ended up with. From Jane’s Brand Timeline Portrait, we discover that Jane is a woman who flosses, who has......

To the casual net surfer it might seem that Bell’s newly launched online video store is just another way the telecommunications giant is competing with rampant P2P file-sharers. “Rent or buy thousands of DVD-quality full-length movies, TV shows and music videos,” the website boasts, adding that files can be viewed through portable media players (but not iPods. They're, um, actually not viewable on any Apple machines). “Your favourite videos available 24/7 to download and......

The serialized web show Team Epic is quintessentially Toronto, hence our interest. Following the success of all things superhero, the series follows a team of Canadian superpowered do-gooders. The team assembles after the death of the country's number one hero, The Canadian Shield. Captain Epic—a Superman-style Silver Age hero who believes in truth, justice, and the Canadian Way—leads the bunch. Master Brood is an obviously-not-seventeen-but-supposed-to-look-seventeen goth kid who, due to a curse put on......

The day after the CBC announced its plans to release the finale of Canada's Next Great Prime Minister through BitTorrent, Bell Canada has moved quietly to throttle its services—including peer-to-peer filesharing—outraging both its customers and wholesale clients. Among the affected is TekSavvy, a family-run Internet Service Provider based in Chatham with service areas in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia. Describing its people-first approach as "revolutionary," Broadband Reports profiled TekSavvy as the top North......

Photo by Jordan Roberts from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. If you haven’t been living in a pothole the last few weeks, you’ve probably heard at least a passing mention of Chris Avenir, the Ryerson University student accused of cheating through Facebook. On March 19th, word came down from the presiding disciplinary panel at Ryerson that Avenir would not face the academic guillotine over his Facebook study group. A first-year engineering student, Avenir had put......

Fans of obscure pop culture and history buffs will welcome the complete redesign and relaunch of the CBC Digital Archives. The website features an amazing collection of 12,000 television and radio clips drawn from seventy years of CBC broadcasts. The CBC's serious side is well-represented on the site, with historic clips of the Second World War, political profiles, and stories of cultural milestones. But there are also plenty of quaintly anachronistic news reports, such......

Toronto principal in controversial controversy over explicit poems he wrote and posted to his website. This is of course the first recorded case ever of somebody getting in trouble for something they wrote on the Internet, and the scandal has sent shock waves through the online community. "Wait, somebody actually reads this shit?" said Patrick Metzger. "Dammit, I better re-emphasize that my erotic snuff story about Geri Halliwell is purely a work of fiction!"......

City sells "the McDonald's site" on Bloor for a fairly low price. However, Adam Vaughan insists there are upsides to the deal, such as being able to limit the height of the condo development that will take its place, because who would want tall buildings in the downtown core? Patrick Swayze has pancreatic cancer. Although initial reports that he has "weeks to live" were apparently false, pancreatic cancer is still one of the deadliest......

In the music industry's latest attempt to lazily claw itself out of the grave, the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC) is proposing a $5.00 per month licence fee on Canadian Internet accounts that would legalize music downloads. They're calling it the Right to Equitable Remuneration for Music File Sharing, a "reasonable and unobtrusive system of compensation" that will allow consumers to fill their bellies full of all the music they can handle from any......

Photo by Denmar from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. Canadian telcos are masters at exploiting customer tolerance limits—when you need a mobile device and are locked into a contract with few alternative options, you're pretty much forced to accept the beatdown levied by one of the three majors. And the carriers benefit greatly by confusing customers, whether it be via despicable "system access fees" or by giving meaningless, unhelpful names to monthly rate plans, like......

Provincial Conservative leader John Tory, battling to stay employed in the face of disaffected fellow partiers who want to hold a leadership review next month, says in a letter on his website that he has travelled the province listening to members and coming up with ideas to address their concerns. The Tories are lucky; a leader who also had a job as an MPP probably wouldn't have time for stuff like that. Provincial education......

Google has always been known for its clean, lightweight, ad-free search page, but Canada's largest provider of broadband internet is under fire today for messing with it. Toronto-based Rogers has begun testing a controversial technique that allows the media empire to insert its own content into another entity's web page, angering net neutrality proponents. According to a tip passed to L.A.-based technology expert Lauren Weinstein, the system being employed is manufactured by the "in-browser......

Bell is launching a preemptive strike before the much-drooled-over iPhone lands in Canada. The Star reports that Bell customers with the new HTC Touch phone (pictured right) could get unlimited wireless data for just $7 a month. (Data transferring is necessary to get music, games, television and the web onto your phone.) The Touch is similar to the iPhone in that both substitute a keypad for a touch screen and can run applications, but the......

Our national infrastructure needs $123 billion in investment to avoid collapse. If Canada's governments don't spend the money, we will end up looking like The Road Warrior. (Torontoist dibs being the Gyro Captain.) Internet "brownouts" could become common by 2010. Yes, you read that right: the horror of slow downloads could happen to you. The report, prepared by an organization funded by the American telecommunications industry, recommends massive investment in fibre optic cabling for......

Bad news if you're a lacrosse fan: the 2008 National Lacrosse League season has been cancelled. Pick your joke: 1) "I'm sure all three of you are very disappointed"; 2) "Players are refusing to play until they get reimbursed for their bus tickets"; 3) "My God, this is the national sport we're talking about here! Why isn't Stephen Harper doing something, for the love of God?"; 4) "So, why are the Toronto Rock still......

More than a week of protests in Toronto against the violence in Burma culminated last night with the Global March for the People of Burma. The demonstration began at 6:00 p.m. in front of the Chinese consulate on St. George Street before making its way to Queen's Park, where a vigil was led by monks from the city's Buddhist temples. According to the Toronto Star, hundreds heeded the call from Amnesty International and other......

If you dig free stuff and you happen to be walking through Kensington Market or Queen West this week, local band The Craft Economy have burned a hundred copies of their debut EP All On C and stapled them to hydro poles as a way of promoting their upcoming show. All On C is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. That means whether you rip it off the Internet, or a pole,......

Sin And Sun recently interviewed Rebekah, a Torontonian who has gone from living on the streets to being an erotic Internet entrepreneur. Her client niche? People who are turned on by smoke and smoking. No sex, no nudity; just a woman with a Cuban cigar and a pack of Gitanes. Rebekah, who describes herself as "a punk rock gothic power smoker who adores cigars and unfiltered cigarettes," maintains a Flickr account with over a......

Wireless number portability (WNP), the ability to keep your cellular phone number when you change service providers, came to Canada in March of this year. The masses of consumers looking to free themselves from their frustrating cell companies cheered. Those cheers turned to grumbles with the realization that the spiffy new phones received for “free” came attached to lengthy service contracts. Breaking a contract can make switching to (or from) the company with the......

There are more ways to walk and discover this city than just following the city’s Discovery Walk maps. There are an increasing number of guided audio tours that you can download from the Internet and pack into your digital music player before heading out on your expedition. One audio tour company, City Surf, has several neighbourhood tours available for about $10 each. Recently, City Surf teamed up with Waterfront Toronto to offer a free......

Eight months after Torontoist, Reading Toronto, Spacing, and BlogTO all banded together to solicit reader comments to improve the TTC's website and after Adam Giambrone agreed to re-open the Request for Proposal (RFP) to allow for "a more ambitious and exciting project," there has finally been some news to report of late. Last week, Adam Giambrone told Torontoist that the website would launch sometime in the fall, and would definitely feature everyone's top request––a......

If you’re feeling hungry and are looking for something a little less bland than your average, it might be worth dropping by the Tenth Annual World Spicy Food Festival at Harbourfront. The Festival promises three solid days of spicy goodness, with heat levels ranging from slightly piquant to eye-popping, face-melting, sinus-clearing insanity. Highlights of the festival include candied insects courtesy of Sugar Mountain and a series of tastings by a group of women (somewhat misleadingly)......